Tag: Warhammer

Warhammer 40,000 eighth edition was released yesterday (17th of June for those of you reading this in the future) and I got the Dark Imperium starter box and I’m bloody chuffed with it.

The box itself is really nice and particularly well put together; opening it is almost an experience in itself. Whereas previously it’s been a matter of just popping the lid off and rummaging through the contents, this one has a slip cover before you even get to the main box.

Once the cover’s off, there’s a box in a box that contains the models, which you lift out to get to the rest of the stuff. I particularly like that they’re in their own box; breaking a little purity seal to get to the miniatures is a nice touch. There’s certainly thought gone into how it’s all been put together.

I haven’t done anything with the miniatures yet, that exciting prospect is looming large though and I expect to be getting stuck in to the Death Guard over the next couple of weeks. One thing I can say, after poring over the sprues at great length, is how awesome they all look. Taken at face value, they look like they’re all going to be a treat to work with.

All the things you’d expect in a starter set are present and correct. The little getting you started books for the Primaris Marines and the Death Guard, dice and whatnot.

One thing that does deserve a mention is the death of the range-rulers of doom. They’ve been replaced with a flexible see through ruler thingy, which is probably for the best, given how much trouble those deadly, red sods have caused over the years.

The rulebook is one of the full size, hardback beasts and as far as I know, the same sort you’d buy if you were to purchase it separately and on that alone is a mark in Games Workshop’s favour.

It has loads of lovely looking artwork, both old and new. A good deal of it is the sort you can spend time looking at, soaking up the multitude of things going on. There’s a particularly nice Imperial Fists piece that deserves special mention, which I think I would have to say is one of my favourites.

As far as the background is concerned, there is loads of it. This is great if you’re new to the hobby. Unfortunately, an awful lot of it covers the same ground as previous editions and if like me you got in at the ground floor as far as 40K is concerned, you will have seen a lot of it before. Whereas this is inevitable up to a point; history of the Imperium and such, there are what I would consider to be missed opportunities.

The section detailing the races of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe is an example of this. The description of each race is generic and apart from a few instances, doesn’t contain much in the way of new material. It would have been nice to know how each race is dealing with the changes wrought by the Cicatrix Maladictum, Gorks Grin, or whatever the chosen name of it is for each race, for example.

Also, unless I’m being particularly dense, there is a large continuity error regarding Roboute and the Blood Angels. I won’t say anything more with regards to that, as it would be spoilertastic for those yet to read it. Suffice to say, as somebody who likes the background material as much as I do, mistakes of this sort bother me. As I said, I might be missing something, but I don’t think so.

Something else they need to work on, as far as the background is concerned is their obsession with the Ultramarines in general and Roboute in particular. I’m not an Ultramarine hater, I have an army of them that I’ve been collecting on and off for close to thirty years now. But I can understand where a lot of the resentment comes from and some of the stuff in here is likely to exacerbate the strength of feeling against them.

They’ve been pushed hard for a long time now and with the return of Roboute it seems to be getting worse. Some of the stuff they’ve done is so overblown and cringeworthy that it can read like fan-fiction at times.

I won’t say more about the background, otherwise I might end up coming across as a grumpy old sod who doesn’t like anything and I’m not, honest. The truth is, the background isn’t awful, but it is, as I said earlier, in part at least, a missed opportunity.

I’ve already touched on the artwork, but the photography also deserves a mention. There are some fabulous models on show in the book, both in terms of sculpt and paint job and as somebody who has taken lots of pictures of my own models, I can safely say that Games Workshops photographers deserve a pat on the back too.

As far as the rules are concerned, I can’t really go into much detail about them yet. I’ve read the core rules and cast an eye over the advanced stuff and the scenarios and I like what I’ve seen.

It seems like they’ve removed a lot of the clutter and whereas the core rules are wee, I wouldn’t say they’ve been dumbed down, more streamlined.

Matched, narrative and open play are something I’m happy to see. A lot of my games will probably be matched play, but I can certainly think of instances where I will play using narrative, or open play as well.

All in all, it seems to be a solid release. A great starter box with ruleset that seems ripe with potential. The issues with the background are a little problematic, and whereas it does mar the finished product for me a bit, it’s not a deal-breaker.

This, however is just how feel about it as a crusty old 40K dude and the background certainly won’t be an issue for a newcomer to the game, which is arguably who the starter set is aimed at. It’s a good box for anyone into Warhammer 40,000, but perfect for newcomers.

I’ve been pretty heavily invested in the worlds that Games Workshop create for over twenty five years now and I love their background. It’s one of the things that stopped me from jumping ship to another company during the too long period when they seemed to be going out of their way to alienate everybody over the age of fifteen.

They’ve had some pretty strange ideas over the years, ideas that often seemed to run pretty contrary to common sense, but the one that always boggled my mind the most was their attitude to the internet.

Before I get stuck into this, I would like to say that Games Workshop over the past year or two has felt like almost an entirely different company and for the most part I’m pretty happy with the direction things seem to be going in. There was a substantial slice of time though when this was not the case.

The internet; I think we can all agree that short of a Mad Max type Apocalypse, it’s not going anywhere and that most of us probably wouldn’t want it to. No internet would certainly make blogging a bit tricky.

There was a fairly substantial slice of time when Games Workshop treated the internet like it was a passing fad that was going to fade away if they ignored it long enough. This all seemed to stem from a forum they ran for a while some time ago.

It was a reasonably interesting place for a time. If you’ve been into the hobby for a while you may even have experience of it yourself, but it started to become overloaded with people who were going there to launch personal attacks on the company. Did the company deserve this and did a lot of these people’s opinions have merit? Up to a point, yes. However the forum was there to discuss the hobby side of the hobby and not the business side, so it was never going to end well.

Instead of attempting to address the situation rationally, they threw their toys out of the pram, closed the forum and almost entirely withdrew from the internet. Sure, they still had the webstore, but I imagine even they could see that closing that would have been akin to company suicide.

Over the next few years they rolled back their online presence more and more, even abandoning a pretty popular Twitter feed. I don’t pretend to know a great deal about business and the only thing I know about their profits is what I’ve read on hobby forums. For a while at least making a profit seemed to be problematic for them and part of the reason for this may well have been as a result of them closing themselves off from their fanbase and taking us for granted.

As a company they had been in a bit of a downward spiral for quite a while, at least as far as their reputation was concerned and the internet thing was by no means the first bad decision they made; nor was it their last.

You’d probably get a hundred different answers from a hundred different people if you asked them to tell you what their problem was with the company a few years ago, but most of them probably would have agreed on two points. The Finecast debacle and the botched Age of Sigmar launch.

Finecast. It was a cool idea in principal. Replace the range of metal miniatures with the same models, but cast in resin. Lighter, cheaper and more detailed. They were definitely lighter.

There was no difference in price people paid between the metal models and their resin counterparts and in some cases the prices even went up. As far as the detail was concerned; it was indeed better, if you could get one that wasn’t faulty and that was the problem.

I don’t know how true this is but I heard of independent retailers who found more than half of their stock to be faulty, at least in the initial run. I have no way of knowing how accurate this is, but from my experience with the early Finecast range, it certainly feels right.

The range must have been rushed out before it was ready and Games Workshop as a company must surely have paid a high price for their haste. I will say that as far as I know, they accepted returns from people and offered refunds, or replacements to anyone who got in touch with regarding a faulty model. In my experience, this is one area that they have always excelled in.

Finecast as a brand is so toxic that even Games Workshop have ditched the name now. They still sell resin models and they seem to be, whilst still not perfect, at least usable in most cases now. I’ve painted a few on commission, but for my own collection, unless there’s no alternative I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole. This is no comment on Forgeworld’s resin, they have a pretty splendid reputation as far as I’m aware.

As far as Age of Sigmar is concerned, I believe it’s quite an enjoyable game, with a well-rounded ruleset now and it certainly has a lot of beautiful miniatures. Although I’ve perused the rules, I’ve never played it; I just haven’t been able to work up the enthusiasm for it so far.

When it was released, it replaced the much-loved Warhammer Fantasy Battle; a game that had been around for an epic amount of time. It offered an entirely different experience to Warhammer 40,000 gameplay wise and had a rich, well developed background.

While it is true that it wasn’t selling as well as it had, this could have been addressed without killing the whole system and all the background.

Part of the problem with regards to the decline of Warhammer Fantasy, is the uneven coverage it got in White Dwarf, Games Workshop’s hobby magazine. The coverage often seemed skewed towards the more popular Warhammer 40,000 and while this is my favourite system, it always seemed a little unfair.

Also, as unintentional as it presumably was, when they acquired the licence for Lord of the Rings, from a fantasy perspective they went into competition with themselves. By having two totally different fantasy ranges competing for the same slice of the pie, they were setting one of them up for a fall.

Whereas Warhammer Fantasy kept a lot of the gamers it already had, Games Workshop didn’t really give itself an outlet to pick up very many new gamers for the system.

It seemed to me though, that Games Workshop grabbed the wrong end of the stick and decided that the reason Warhammer Fantasy wasn’t selling, was that it wasn’t enough like Warhammer 40,000, so along came Age of Sigmar.

As I said earlier Age of Sigmar seems to be perfectly fine now it’s bedded in and things have been rounded off. On release however, it seemed very bare bones and everything that was there was entirely new. Quite simply, it may not have been that there was anything particularly wrong with it, but that it had big shoes to fill and on release it struggled to do so.

Despite all the turbulent times, they really seem to have turned over a new leaf. While I don’t think they’re quite at the stage they were at in what I consider to be the glory days, they do seem to be trying; it’s also a little bit possible that to some extent I may be looking at the past through rose tinted glasses.

They’ve even got their sense of humour back and the ability to have a laugh at your own expense is never a bad thing.